It was not long ago, in April 2018, I uploaded my first app to the Google Play store. In the next 6 months I had like over 100 downloads and 98 installs. That means that over 100 people downloaded the app and only 98 people kept the app for more than a day. Fast forward, I wanted to experiment with online advertising and make my app -also my website- more popular. I got a free $100 advertising coupon from Bing ads when I sign up with Microsoft Webmaster Tools. I also added $10 extra to the account because the coupon requires a small amount of money to be deposit in the account to combat fraudulent marketing.

So, in October 12, I tried BingAds with a credit of $110 and spend all the money in 30 days, just to see if online advertising really works.

Setting up the account was easy and it was an easy process for me. Well, I believe it was easy because I took some online Google Adwords certification courses from Academy for Ads. I think some people will spend a bit more time reading and planning if they are doing this for the first time.

Choosing our location was also easy as I wanted to target around the world where Spanish and English people spoke. I had to Google "Spanish speaking countries" to find a list of all the countries that spoke Spanish.

Next was choosing the right words and sentences for the ad. I did 2, one in English and the other one with Spanish. I also redirected to the traffic to my website that has information on the app and the link to the Google Play. I also did more configuration in the campaign, such as picking the right "search words" and doing some finishing touches.

I finished and I remember going to DuckDuckGo search engine and type "JesueRocha" and (boom!) I see my ad. It felt weird seeing your ad in DuckDuckGo. It's nice the Bing Network includes Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Anyway, the campaign had like a spending budget of $3-4 dollars a day, as I wanted to only spend $110 in 30 days.

Fast forward on November 12...ish, I spend all that money and the results is pretty good. OK, I kind of cheated a bit, because I also did Google Adwords campaign with $30 budget. The reason I did this is to compare the online advertising rates and values. The Click-through rate (CTR) was 0.33%! That means less than 1 percent who saw my ad click on it. Google Ads had 1.31% CTR. Does that mean BingAds is a worse in online advertising? NO! In fact, $110 got me over 828,000 impressions and about 3,000 people click on those ads, compare to Google's 49,800 impressions and 650 clicks.

Every day I looked in Google analytics and notice how much traffic increase with BingAds and Google Adwords advertising. My app went from 100 downloads to over 1000 downloads in 30 days. However, many people who click on the ads had iPhone and Fire (Amazon) devices and I did not have an app ready for them. Maybe next time I do this I will target Android users. Another problem with BingAds that I notice is that when I looked at the referrals, some websites were sketchy as some of them had too many ads and I doubt real people click on those heavy ad web pages.

Well, my next post will be about Google Adwords and my experience with "free" $300 online advertising coupon. See you next time.

Also a quick edit on the promotion: Offer expires December 31, 2018 if you want the free $100 advertising. So if you have a website, then join Bing Webmaster Tool service.

For more info of the coupon: Bing Ads promotional offers (coupons)

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